Valicious

Effective January 17th, 2016, USPS raised their rates across the board. Most notable is a 21% increase for first class international mail, as well as not giving a discount for paying for shipping online anymore. We are currently in talks with other shipping companies about getting discounts to make shipping more affordable. (We ship over 100lbs/month) RarezHut is working nonstop so that our customers are not punished by this increase. We'll keep everyone updated as we learn more.

Added a description of our Digital Copies service to the OP. After running more simulations that I can count, we have also reduced our fees from 13/15% to 10/13%! Digital copies: Along with any cassette/VHS purchases, we offer high-quality digital copies made with professional-grade equipment free-of-charge. We realize that not everyone has the means to play these aging formats, but we aim not to let that get in the way of you being able to enjoy them!

We are continuing to send out shipping invoices, thank you for your patience We apologize that it's taking slightly longer this time. Panda started school this week, and his Game Dev and C++ classes are not going easy the first week. Valicious wishes she could help, but stupid useless hands are not allowing that. We are forsaking sleep tonight in an effort to finish packing, weighing, and invoicing for all 30+ packages.

Thank you again to everyone who came to the streams the last two weekends. We're steadilly working on packing up orders and should start sending out invoices tonight.

Any is fine, of course And it doesn't need to be limited to music at all, either.

Nobody told me Biopanda was a Trump supporter :v

The RarezHut livestream auction starts in 10 minutes! We're just chilling watching videos while we wait www.rarezhut.net/stream

IS LIVE!!! There's a thread in MH Market for it http://www.monochrome-heaven.com/index.php/topic/39950-rarezhut-imports-a-new-kind-of-shopping-service/

The "Charge 1" is just the singular amount that we give you. The "Charge 2" is entirely handled by us. When your items are delivered to us, we will combine them with any items from the RarezHut stream or store. The main benefit for non-US customers is that they can combine RH Imports orders and RH stream/store orders, rather than paying for separate shipping for each. If you are really curious, you can always estimate the weight of your items, then use https://postcalc.usps.com/ to estimate shipping from zip code 87114.

Introducing a new type of shopping service! One without prohibitive shipping charges! This is primarily geared toward people in the USA, but there is a way to make it work for those outside the US. It operates in the same way as a regular shopping service in that you email us your desired item, we'll send you back a price quote, you'll send us the money over PayPal, and we'll buy the item. (We plan on making a webpage with a fee calculator to minimize back-and-forth messaging.) At the cost of slightly-higher per-item fees, customers in the US will pay shipping from New Mexico rather than Japan. We only charge an extra 3% fee to help cover PayPal fees, as well as a nominal 100 yen per CD and 200 yen per VHS. (On top of what FromJapan charges) The customer ends up saving a lot of money because the additional per-item fees pale in comparison to international shipping costs. As with other RarezHut services, we can provide the digital copies service if the buyer would like. Digital copies: Along with any cassette/VHS purchases, we offer high-quality digital copies made with professional-grade equipment free-of-charge. We realize that not everyone has the means to play these aging formats, but we aim not to let that get in the way of you being able to enjoy them! Q: How are you able to do this? How do you make money from this? This seems too good to be true. A: The short answer is, we don't expect to make money from this. We have been brainstorming ways to make owning VK easier for the average fan for over two years now. While RarezHut's webshop and streams do help this, it doesn't help the fan who wants newer releases. Leveraging our existing relationship with FromJapan, we are able to charge the smallest-possible per-item price increase over multiple orders in order to pay for international shipping. Is this a lot of work for absolutely no profit? Yes, but we believe it will benefit the health of the community. Could this spectacularly backfire and end up COSTING us money? If we only get one of two orders then it very well will, but I believe it is still worth pursuing. Great reward (a service to MH and the fandom as a whole in this case) has never come without that initial leap into the unknown. Q: Can I only buy stuff from certain places? What types of items will you buy, just CDs/DVDs/VHS/tapes? A: If we can place an order through FromJapan, then we can get your stuff for you. This includes (but not limited to) PureSound, band webshops, Amazon.co.jp, and more. While CDs/DVDs/VHS/tapes make up the majority of our orders, we will certainly work with you if you want to order clothing or toys for instance. Q: How do you handle auctions? Can I still buy from Yahoo Auctions through you? A: You absolutely can! For auctions that involve bidding, simply tell us the amount of the bid you want to place (or you’re max bid), and we will place it. We will make every effort to place a bid the moment we receive your email, but we ask that you do keep in mind that we are humans and still subject to that pesky habit called sleep. If the auction ends at a lower price than your max bid, we'll refund the difference. Q: How much longer would this whole process take compared to if I were to just order things by myself? A: One of the ways we get a lower per-item shipping cost is that we end up shipping giant crates with hundreds of items. Our giant crate shipments are typically once/month, so we will announce a date when our next shipment will go out, and people have up until a week before that date to place their order. We use FedEx priority to get the package stateside, which only takes about 3 days. LET'S NOT FORGET OUR NON-US CUSTOMERS Paying a higher-per item fee PLUS shipping from the US doesn't make sense. What some of RarezHut's EU costumers have chosen to do is have us order their items like normal, then include them in the shipment that they buy off our streaming auctions or our store. The offer to combine shopping service orders with stream and store orders extends to our US customers as well of course. ORDER SCHEDULE THE DEADLINE FOR ORDERS TO GO OUT IN THE NEXT SHIPMENT IS October 24TH, 2016 WE WILL BE SHIPPING EVERYTHING TO NEW MEXICO ON November 5th, 2016 If you don't make the deadline for this shipment, don't despair. A new shipment window will begin as soon as this one ends. Please email us at [email protected] to place an order, and we will respond as soon as humanly possible.

Here's a sneak peak of SOME of the rarez for tomorrow's stream because we love you all so much. Don't miss it! 11AM MST/6PM GMT

We would certainly be able to get exclusive shop bonuses and web-shop things, as those are both things that we can get through FromJapan. Live-limited stuff is a no-go, unfortunately, since that would require someone in Japan to go to concerts. If you want to pay to fly Panda to Japan, then I'm sure he'd pick up whatever you want though

Sorry for not responding to you in my last post. Our new stream schedule places streams every other month. The intervening months are going to be spent on the webshop. (adding inventory, increasing functionality, etc) It's like we've become old pros at packing and shipping due to the streams, so we're not worried about that. I know balancing time and completing everything quickly is a legitimate and timely concern, so I'll go into more detail. (pun fully intended) Here is our existing schedule with the shopping service as well. Month One: week 1: catalog and research OUR new inventory, sort shopping service orders and pack them up, send out shipping quotes and mail out packages as quotes are paid, plan next FromJapan crate and start taking orders. week 2: creating music playlist for stream, checking software, handpicking stuff for giveaways STREAM WEEKEND, send out invoice, fall into a light coma week 3: work on misc stuff, manage payments/reminders for invoices, doing inventory prep for packing supplies STREAM WEEKEND, pack up everything (20+ orders), get shipping quotes, send out invoices+quotes, fall into a mild coma week 4: send out packages as we receive payment, finalize and ensure everything we bought is at FromJapan, send the next big crate on it's way to us. (then immediately cry as someone has a giant sale right after) Month Two: week 1: catalog and research OUR new inventory, sort shopping service orders and pack them up, send out shipping quotes and mail out packages as quotes are paid, plan next FromJapan crate and start taking orders. weeks 2-3: work on webshop functionality, add more products to webshop week 4: finalize and ensure everything we bought is at FromJapan, send the next big crate on it's way to us. (then cry as ANOTHER big sale starts)

Just to address this quickly, but the shipping that we almost always use for our international customers IS the cheapest available... it's just standard US post. As of maybe 3-4 years ago, tracking became free and included on all packages sent via USPS. Unfortunately it really is just that expensive to ship from the US We've been working on things in the background, so there's a lot that's not apparent at the moment. Panda has been working to completely redo the RarezHut webshop as we are both not very happy with how it currently is... this is why there hasn't been any store updates in a while. Until the new store is up, we've been focusing mostly on the streams since it seemed like the best way to sell our new inventory in the meantime. Once the new site is up, the inventory will be split between what goes on the stream and what goes directly on the site. We're also looking into other ways that we can improve our streams(they're still a work in progress, after all) and any suggestions there are very appreciated

hypothetical situation: We announce that we have an open FromJapan order that will ship out Feb 20th, and people have until Feb 13th to get their orders in to guarantee they go out in this shipment. We charge 13% (if over 1000 yen, otherwise 15%) on top of FromJapan's per-item fees (200 yen/item, internal shipping), you end up saving though because you are not paying EMS shipping or the percentage of the shipping fees that they charge you. If you ever feel like checking out the RarezHut store or streams, we can always combine anything you special order with your store/stream order. The prices on the store and stream are quite cheaper than you'll most likely find in Japan too. So it evens out some

I was thinking of leaving this thread up for a few more days to get more feedback and generate more discussion. I'll then create a MH Market thread (separate from the main RarezHut one) with more details such as shipment times and windows. If there is enough interest and demand for this service, we may even be able to lower our rates.